December 7, 2010, Cancun -- News reports indicate World Bank President Robert Zoellick is coming to Cancun tomorrow to announce the establishment of a multi-million dollar fund to promote the creation of carbon markets in developing countries.

Friends of the Earth U.S. Climate Campaigner Karen Orenstein had the following response:

“Carbon markets are an irreparably flawed means of addressing climate change. They are unreliable and subject to fraud, and they open the door to offset loopholes that undermine environmental integrity. They expand Wall Street influence, and they further entrench the economic arrangements that facilitate the North’s over-consumption and are causing the climate crisis in the first place.

“The World Bank’s decision to establish this fund is yet another blemish on its already-soiled social and environmental record. World Bank coal funding hit a record high of $4.4 billion in 2010, and the Bank has a long history of making decisions that have had tremendously harmful impacts on poor countries.”

The World Bank carbon market fund will be discussed at the Friends of the Earth International press conference in the Moon Palace tomorrow afternoon. (It will also be available online here: http://webcast.cc2010.mx/)